page_title: The Human Abstract (poem)
section_title: Context and interpretation
hierarchical_section_title: The Human Abstract (poem) / Context and interpretation
caption_attribution_description: English: Urizen with his net - The Book of Urizen, copy G, object 27 c1818 (Library of Congress) Detail
context_page_description: "The Human Abstract" is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. The poem was originally drafted in Blake's notebook and was later revised for as part of publication in Songs of Experience. Critics of the poem have noted it as demonstrative of Blake's metaphysical poetry and its emphasis on the tension between the human and the divine.
context_section_description: The poem was engraved on a single plate as a part of the Songs of Experience (1794) and reprinted in Gilchrist's Life of Blake in the second volume 1863/1880 from the draft in the Notebook of William Blake (p. 107 reversed, see the example on the right), where the first title of the poem The Earth was erased and The human Image substituted. The title The Human Abstract appeared first in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In the commentary to his publication of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, D. G. Rossetti described this poem as one  of "very perfect and noble examples of Blake's metaphysical poetry".
  The illustration shows a gowned old man with a long beard who kneels with his legs outspread. He raises his arms to grip the ropes as if he tries to free himself. There is a tree trunk with a broad base on the right and the edge of another on the left. The colour of the sky suggests sunrise or sunset. A muddy river runs along the lower edge of the design in front of the  man. The picture portrays the supreme God of Blake's mythology and the creator of the material world, whom Blake named "Urizen" (probably from your reason), struggling with his own nets of religion, under the Tree of Mystery, which symbolically "represents the resulting growth of religion and the priesthood (the Catterpillar and the Fly), feeding on its leaves". 
  The previous title of the poem "The Human Image" shows clearly that it is a counterpart to "The Divine Image" in the Songs of Innocence. There is a great difference between two worlds: of Innocence and of Experience. In "The Divine Image" of Innocence Blake establishes four great virtues: mercy, pity, peace, and love, where the last one is the greatest and embraces the other three. These four virtues represent God as well as a Man:
  For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
  
  Is God our Father dear:
  
  And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
  
  Is Man His child and care.
  
  For Mercy has a human heart
  
  Pity, a human face:
  
  And Love, the human form divine,
  
  And Peace, the human dress.
  — "The Divine Image", lines 5-12
  However, as Robert F. Gleckner  pointed out, “in the world of experience such a human-divine imaginative unity is shattered, for the Blakean fall, as is well known, is a fall into division, fragmentation, each fragment assuming for itself the importance (and hence the benefits) of the whole. Experience, then, is fundamentally hypocritical and acquisitive, rational and non-imaginative. In such a world virtue cannot exist except as a rationally conceived opposite to vice.”
  Blake made two more attempts to create a counterpart poem to The Divine Image of Innocence. One of them, A Divine Image, was clearly intended for Songs of Experience, and was even etched, but not included into the main corpus of the collection: 
  Cruelty has a Human Heart 
  
  And Jealousy a Human Face 
  
  Terror, the Human Form Divine 
  
  And Secrecy, the Human Dress
  
  The Human Dress, is forged Iron 
  
  The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
  
  The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd 
  
  The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
  — "A Divine Image"
  There are the explicit antitheses in this poem and The Divine Image of the Songs of Innocence.  "The poem's discursiveness, its rather mechanical, almost mathematical simplicity make it unlike other songs of experience; the obviousness of the contrast suggests a hasty, impulsive composition..."
  The four virtues of The Divine Image (mercy, pity, peace, and love) that incorporated the human heart, face, form, and dress were abstracted here from the corpus of the divine, become selfish and hypocritically disguise their true natures, and perverted into cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy.
  Another poem dealing with the same subject "I heard an Angel singing..." exists only in draft version and appeared as the eighth entry of Blake's Notebook, p. 114, reversed, seven pages and about twenty poems before "The Human Image" (that is the draft of "The Human Abstract"). "Blake's intention in 'The Human Abstract' then was to analyze the perversion while making it clear at the same time that imaginatively (to the poet) it was a perv
caption: Urizen with his net - The Book of Urizen, copy G, object 27 c.1818, in the Library of Congress  (detail)
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